About the company

The Microsoft Developer Experience Team (DX) is an organisation of technical evangelists whose mission is to secure the future of the Microsoft Platform by ensuring that students, startups, developers, IT Pros, and ISVs choose Microsoft platforms. Microsoft created DPE in 2001 with a goal of getting software developers excited about building apps using Microsoft tools. Previously, the organisation was also known as the Developer and Platform Evangelism group (DPE). DX is a team whose focus cuts across many different Microsoft product and services groups, and its engineers are tasked with knowing just about everything the company is doing. That explains why team members are called Technical Evangelists.

The challenge

Everyday Technology Evangelists deal with developers, system admins and other tech-savvy guys who use Microsoft products in their work. The biggest challenge was that they often had to repeat the same information over and over again. Thus, the most popular topics were covered either in videos or step-by-step guides. It’s true, videos have some drawbacks as compared to guides, namely huge video traffic, time-consuming aspect of their creation, difficulties to edit the final version, etc. When it came to the creation of step-by-step guides, there was no official standard about the format of the final documents. Technology Evangelists usually took separate screenshots with PrtScn, edited them in Paint and then copied them to a Word document, adding some text descriptions to each screenshot. They were truly fed up with this old approach of creating guides that could take up to half of the day.

The solution

Being really dissatisfied with creating guides manually, several employees decided to find a solution and ran across StepShot. The information about the product got quickly spread by word of mouth among DX team members. StepShot had been being tested within the organization for several months, and finally the organisation decided to buy it. So now StepShot is used in the DX team in Central and Eastern Europe team on a corporate level. With our software, employees create step-by-step guides twice as quickly now. The DX team finds it great that StepShot allows to create guides and manuals with no interruptions in the actual process. There is no longer any need to switch between different tools because StepShot gives all-in-one solution.

On average, a guide consists of 30-40 steps, and it takes only 2-4 hours to create one. As a result, StepShot has ramped up the team’s productivity and morale.

Alexander Belotserkovskiy

Microsoft Technical Evangelist: Cloud, Internet of Things and Open Source

The biggest value of StepShot personally for me is that I don’t have to switch between different contexts. The product allows me to stay focused on the workflow I am documenting.